“A rural residential community is not the right site to be testing this technology,” says Naomi Joyce, a solicitor from Appley Bridge, Lancashire. Born and raised in the village, Joyce helped to lead its fight against a proposed waste-to-fuel plant, which had hoped to convert up to 6,000 tonnes of plastic rubbish into diesel, gasoline and other products each year.

Worried that harmful fumes would pollute their valley, locals rallied against the proposal – signing petitions, writing to the council and protesting in the street. In January last year, the project was shelved.

Proponents of the rapidly growing plastics-to-fuel sector, tipped to be worth $1.9bn (£1.5bn) by 2024, say their technology will help to keep plastic rubbish out of our oceans and away from landfill. By melting non-recyclable plastics into liquid fuel, they claim to offer a new and vital solution to the planet’s plastic waste crisis.

Grassroots opponents disagree – and they are getting in the industry’s way. After Appley Bridge in the UK, the latest protest is taking place in the Australian city of Canberra.

Plans for a new-generation plant in the country’s capital, capable of converting up to 200 tonnes of plastic a day directly into fuel, without first needing to turn it into crude oil as most competitors do, are in doubt.

After locals raised concerns about air and noise pollution from the Foy Group plant, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) government formed a special panel to investigate. It is expected to report its findings in April.

Not just nimbysm

Though local impacts are the focus of the opposition, the objections go beyond nimbyism. Larry O’Loughlin, executive director of the ACT Conservation Council, and one of the leading voices against the plant, says the industry poses a wider environmental threat.

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Although plastics-to-fuel is often discussed as a form of recycling, O’Loughlin says this is misleading given that the plastics may only get used once before conversion into fuel. Widespread adoption could also slow efforts to find alternatives to plastics and gasoline, creating extra demand for the former and additional supply of the latter, he argues.

“At a time of reducing carbon emissions, they are introducing another fossil fuel,” he says. “The ACT is trying to move to zero emissions by 2050. How are we going to do that by setting up a refinery here?”

Foy Group’s managing director, Stuart Clark, says he considers the community opposition “normal and healthy”, and that any new technology requires scrutiny.

But he rejects both the local and macro environmental arguments against the project. Emissions and noise levels would be low, he says, and – far from driving plastic waste – such plants will help to discourage it: “Waste plastics are worthless at the moment, so by giving them a value, it makes people and businesses less inclined to simply throw that plastic away.”

Recovering the fuel content of plastic waste is also more efficient than sourcing new supplies of oil, he adds: “Instead of dragging oil out of the Middle East, transporting it to Australia, refining it, taking it to another outlet, let’s just go to our landfill.”

Making plastic waste valuable

Industry voices aren’t the only ones advocating for plastics-to-fuel. David Attenborough has backed the technology for use in aviation, while the Ocean Recovery Alliance, a conservation NGO, has collaborated with industry players to develop a plastics-to-fuel developer’s guide.

Ocean Recovery Alliance co-founder Douglas Woodring says it is a vital transition technology as the global economy moves away from oil-based products: “Most countries don’t have enough recycling capacity and I don’t foresee them having enough in near future, so to me the best opportunity is to turn the plastic into fuel, not by incineration but by liquidation.”

Woodring sees this as part of the solution to plastic waste in the near term: “Obviously we don’t want this to keep going forever ... but there is so much plastic today with no hope of recycling. This creates value to pay people to collect and sort material.”

It’s an idea that’s reaching beyond the UK and Australia. On Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni salt flats a project run by Japanese tour guide Yoshihito Homma is using plastics-to-fuel technology to try to motivate people to collect rubbish.

Homma takes a mobile plastics-to-fuel machine around local schools to show children an alternative end for the plastic waste encroaching on the salt flats, and is in discussions with the Bolivian government about building a larger plant, he says.

The key to tackling waste, argues Homma, is to shift people’s definition of it: “Changing their perspectives from ‘garbage equals garbage’ to ‘garbage equals resource’ ... that’s the first step we have to take.”